Paula Clifford | March 9, 2010
St Luke 13. 1-9 and Psalm 22. 1-5
As Jesus is making his way slowly towards Jerusalem, he brings up the subject of disasters. The two that he mentions are both associated with Jerusalem: the horrific story of the Galilean Jews who were slaughtered by Pilate, such that their blood “mingled with their sacrifices”; and the collapse of the tower at Siloam. The first is a particularly poignant example as Jesus may well have seen his own future reflected in the fate of his fellow Galileans. Yet we are not invited to dwell on the suffering of the Jewish martyrs or of the 18 people killed by the falling tower. Instead, Jesus asks his followers how they interpret the two events: do they understand them as God punishing people who had been particularly wicked? Was it all their own fault?
Back in September 2001, when New York’s twin towers were attacked, many American preachers quoted the tower of Siloam to support their idea that the US was being punished by God for its excesses, or, at the very least being given a dreadful warning. And across the world today, there are many who would attribute natural disasters to the will of a punishing God. I was in Bangladesh a couple of years ago soon after a devastating cyclone hit the delta area. And both Christian and Muslim preachers were delivering the same sermon: it’s all your fault, they said, God is punishing you for your sins. It was a message that had bitter consequences. When people began to believe that God was punishing them, they could not be persuaded to take basic measures to avert future disaster. If God was intent on punishment, what was the point?
Yet when that huge earthquake struck Haiti a couple of months ago, the story was rather different. The first reaction of Christians there was to praise God: to give thanks that they were alive, even though so many of them had lost everything, family members included. So how are we to react to disaster, whether it’s down to human failings (collapsing buildings) or the forces of nature?
One thing I think we can learn from Pentecostal Christians is a response of lament. Not surprisingly, we tight-lipped Anglicans are somewhat reluctant to express our feelings in language such as that used by the psalmist: “My God why have you forsaken me?” Yet in Pentecostal churches here in London, on the Sunday following the Haitian earthquake, this was exactly their response: lament coupled with prayer and fasting.
But the important thing is what follows that. Because lament, prayer and fasting are not an end in themselves. Lamentation is a prelude to action - in this case raising money for Haiti, a practical response to the great needs of the people affected.
Nonetheless, these verses in Luke 13 are only partly to do with not blaming disasters on human sinfulness. Jesus has a hard message for those of us who have not suffered this kind of calamity: if we don’t repent, things won’t go any better for us. It’s a hard message, but it’s a hopeful one, encapsulated in the picture of the fig tree.
I can empathise with this example, because for the last few years I have been the rather nervous owner of a fig tree myself. And I have learnt the hard way that to get the best out of them you have to give them some tough love. This little detail about “digging around them” has to do with cutting back their roots, so that they produce fruit and not just nice big leaves. So it is with our repentance. Producing fruit – leading lives that are active in God’s service – necessarily entails this discipline, this tough love.
For us in this new Isaiah community, both Jesus’s allusion to disasters at Jerusalem and the parable of the fig tree seem to me to be a call to action. There is the action we are called to undertake on behalf of people in our own neighbourhood suffering their own disasters, as well as action for those caught up in earthquakes and tsunamis in other parts of the world. And we are called to act quite simply because these disasters, whether big or small, can’t be dismissed as something that people have brought upon themselves. In our prayer for them we may well want to use some form of lamentation, expressing our distress and our helplessness; not in some kind of self-indulgent piety, but rather as a way of preparing ourselves to respond, to put our love for our neighbour into action.
In fact, it is surely the case that the prayer of a community has to lead to action. It was the view of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth that no praise of God can be taken seriously, if it is somehow separated from the commandment to act, to love our neighbours as ourselves.
So may our prayers for love and justice impel us to action in support of people overtaken by their own disasters. And may our prayers and our actions, like the well-dug and manured fig tree, bear much fruit.
As Jesus is making his way slowly towards Jerusalem, he brings up the subject of disasters. The two that he mentions are both associated with Jerusalem: the horrific story of the Galilean Jews who were slaughtered by Pilate, such that their blood “mingled with their sacrifices”; and the collapse of the tower at Siloam. The first is a particularly poignant example as Jesus may well have seen his own future reflected in the fate of his fellow Galileans. Yet we are not invited to dwell on the suffering of the Jewish martyrs or of the 18 people killed by the falling tower. Instead, Jesus asks his followers how they interpret the two events: do they understand them as God punishing people who had been particularly wicked? Was it all their own fault?
Back in September 2001, when New York’s twin towers were attacked, many American preachers quoted the tower of Siloam to support their idea that the US was being punished by God for its excesses, or, at the very least being given a dreadful warning. And across the world today, there are many who would attribute natural disasters to the will of a punishing God. I was in Bangladesh a couple of years ago soon after a devastating cyclone hit the delta area. And both Christian and Muslim preachers were delivering the same sermon: it’s all your fault, they said, God is punishing you for your sins. It was a message that had bitter consequences. When people began to believe that God was punishing them, they could not be persuaded to take basic measures to avert future disaster. If God was intent on punishment, what was the point?
Yet when that huge earthquake struck Haiti a couple of months ago, the story was rather different. The first reaction of Christians there was to praise God: to give thanks that they were alive, even though so many of them had lost everything, family members included. So how are we to react to disaster, whether it’s down to human failings (collapsing buildings) or the forces of nature?
One thing I think we can learn from Pentecostal Christians is a response of lament. Not surprisingly, we tight-lipped Anglicans are somewhat reluctant to express our feelings in language such as that used by the psalmist: “My God why have you forsaken me?” Yet in Pentecostal churches here in London, on the Sunday following the Haitian earthquake, this was exactly their response: lament coupled with prayer and fasting.
But the important thing is what follows that. Because lament, prayer and fasting are not an end in themselves. Lamentation is a prelude to action - in this case raising money for Haiti, a practical response to the great needs of the people affected.
Nonetheless, these verses in Luke 13 are only partly to do with not blaming disasters on human sinfulness. Jesus has a hard message for those of us who have not suffered this kind of calamity: if we don’t repent, things won’t go any better for us. It’s a hard message, but it’s a hopeful one, encapsulated in the picture of the fig tree.
I can empathise with this example, because for the last few years I have been the rather nervous owner of a fig tree myself. And I have learnt the hard way that to get the best out of them you have to give them some tough love. This little detail about “digging around them” has to do with cutting back their roots, so that they produce fruit and not just nice big leaves. So it is with our repentance. Producing fruit – leading lives that are active in God’s service – necessarily entails this discipline, this tough love.
For us in this new Isaiah community, both Jesus’s allusion to disasters at Jerusalem and the parable of the fig tree seem to me to be a call to action. There is the action we are called to undertake on behalf of people in our own neighbourhood suffering their own disasters, as well as action for those caught up in earthquakes and tsunamis in other parts of the world. And we are called to act quite simply because these disasters, whether big or small, can’t be dismissed as something that people have brought upon themselves. In our prayer for them we may well want to use some form of lamentation, expressing our distress and our helplessness; not in some kind of self-indulgent piety, but rather as a way of preparing ourselves to respond, to put our love for our neighbour into action.
In fact, it is surely the case that the prayer of a community has to lead to action. It was the view of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth that no praise of God can be taken seriously, if it is somehow separated from the commandment to act, to love our neighbours as ourselves.
So may our prayers for love and justice impel us to action in support of people overtaken by their own disasters. And may our prayers and our actions, like the well-dug and manured fig tree, bear much fruit.
